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While Lara Means goes missing, Frank Black and Peter Watts are quarantined by the Millennium Group after they come in contact with an unknown disease and Jordan experiences a terrifying nightmare. (Part 1 of 2)

On a farm in Baraboo, Wisconsin in 1986, a farmer finds his entire warehouse of chickens dead, the floor soaked in blood. He attempts to run, but collapses dead, bleeding profusely and covered in dark lesions.

Twelve years later, Millennium Group member Frank Black (Lance Henriksen) is visited by a retired Federal Bureau of Investigation agent, Richard Gilbert (Glenn Morshower). Gilbert hopes to headhunt Black for his new private security firm, The Trust. Their meeting abruptly ends when Black receives word that his father has died. At the funeral, Black explains the notion of death to his young daughter; later that day, he unsuccessfully tries to contact fellow Group member Lara Means (Kristen Cloke), with whom he has lost contact.

Black meets with another Group member, Peter Watts (Terry O'Quinn) to investigate the death of a man found surrounded by six pints of spilt blood, with no evidence of murder. A coroner determines that the man drowned when his lungs filled with his own blood, surmising the cause to be a viral infection. Everyone who came into contact with the corpse is isolated in quarantine, waiting to be tested for exposure to any pathogen. While quarantined, Black accuses Watts and the Millennium Group of knowing more about the virus than is apparent. Watts simply responds by quoting the Bible's Book of Revelation. The pair are examined by mysterious doctors in protective suits; shortly afterwards, they are cleared to leave quarantine. Black contacts Gilbert and expresses his wish to leave the Millennium Group and join The Trust—however, he first wishes to "rescue" his friends within the Group.

Elsewhere, a family sit down to dinner together, before spontaneously collapsing and bleeding profusely; further victims of the virus. At home, Black learns that his daughter has been having vivid nightmares about the end of the world, in which she and her parents are isolated in a woodland cabin. Black admits to his wife that he has come to accept the Group as a cult, and wishes to leave. He arranges to see a doctor, wishing to be tested but wanting the results to remain secret.

Gilbert surveils Watts, finding that the latter has been in contact with Means. Black travels to where Means is living, where he remotely observes a cult-like ceremony in which Means is ritually inducted into the Group. He contacts Watts, divulging the results of his tests—they were injected with a vaccine while quarantined. Black warns Watts that the Group is dangerous; Watts neither confirms nor denies this, but predicts the arrival of an earthquake, urging Black that should this prediction come to pass, he should accept full membership of the Group. That night, Black answers a telephone call from Means, who tells him that the Group mean no harm. The line suddenly cuts, and the tremors of an earthquake begin just as Watts had predicted. Black moves through his home, noticing that his pet bird is dead in its cage, covered in blood.